Review of Ben Rafoth’s Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers

At the University of
Hawai’i at Mānoa, our writing center sees quite the diversity of
students. Although the majority of the students are native speakers
of English, there is a significant number of nonnative English
speakers that utilize our services; i.e., speakers of Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean comprise 32.64% of unique clients. We also work
with speakers of a myriad of different languages that span from
European (French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish) to Pacific
(Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Indonesian, Thai). Although Hawai’i
is known to be a mosaic of cultures and languages, it is both
interesting and important that Ben Rafoth's Multilingual Writers
and Writing Centers calls attention to the growing diversity of
multilingual students in writing centers across the United States and
the rest of the world.

Although Rafoth's is “a
book written for writing center directors and tutors who take
seriously the preparations needed to work with international
multilingual students in the United States,” the book is also a
useful resource for writing center tutoring in general (1). As
directors of and tutors in writing centers, it is our responsibility
to not only “have the knowledge and skills to help multicultural
and multilingual writers meet their goals of improving their written
English,” but also to act responsibly and with proper sensibilities
that don't create needlessly hegemonic relations (138). As Bobbi
Olson notes in her essay
Rethinking
Our Work with Multilingual Writers: The Ethics and Responsibility of
Language Teaching in the Writing Center,

we bear, in other words, a critical responsibility for acknowledging the
ethical dimensions of our work, particularly given the historical
functions writing centers have been made to serve within institutions
of higher education as gatekeepers of access and conservators of
particular conceptions of academic Englishes. And perhaps even more
importantly, we need to consider the ways in which our own privileges
and institutional positioning make us susceptible to perpetuating the
unequal power distributions in which multilingual writers are
frequently embedded.

In Multicultural
Writers and Writing Centers, Rafoth provides an extensive array
of interviews from his prodigious experiences working with
composition studies, writing center studies, and TESOL programs. Each
of these detailed accounts of students, tutors, and directors maps
out particular pedagogical situations of interest that “invigorate
the preparation of tutors and directors for the multilingual futures
that await us all” (17).

In the first chapter, The Changing Faces of
Writing Centers, Rafoth notes how writing
literacy in the English language is more important than ever
throughout the world. As the world's population of college and
university students increases—in the British Council's estimate,
world enrollment is expected to increase by twenty-one million
students by 2020—the number of international students in the United
States also sees continual growth (19). These multilingual students
bring different linguistic varieties of English to the writing
centers they frequent. Rafoth points out that writing centers are
already spaces of negotiation among dialects of English and that even
among multilingual students, there are disparate groups. For example,
international students and refugees and immigrants can all be marked
as nonnative English speakers, but there are strong differences
within these groups. Although they all may be separated from their
respective homes, “international students in the United States are
here mostly because they choose to study in the United States,
[while] many refugees and immigrants do not necessarily choose or
want to learn English or any new language” (32-33). As such, Rafoth
suggests a downside to labeling students in general; what is of
utmost importance is to understand and respect the nuances
multilingual students, and tutors, bring to their writing centers.

Rafoth addresses the
interactions between tutor and student in his second chapter,
Learning from Interaction. Offered are a great
deal of general tutoring instructions—e.g., the importance of listening in
interactive conversations, the differences between incomplete
understandings versus simple misinterpretations, the potholes of
negative transfer—and many of the terms Rafoth uses are collected
conveniently in a glossary. The chapter also provides insight into
social and cultural contexts that can help tutors when working with
multilingual students:

For many, English is a means to attain social mobility, cultural and
personal enrichment, and a path out of poverty, isolation, and
tedious labor. Tutors are not usually aware of these factors, but
they need to know that motivation, resourcefulness, will power, and
even strong feelings of guilt, honor, and obligation may lie just
beneath the surface in a consultation. (43)

Anxieties can arise for
multilingual students, especially graduate students, since many
peer-reviewed publications are dominated by the English language.
This unfortunately creates a situation where students oftentimes
privilege the product (publication) over the process (becoming a
better writer) during tutoring consultations. But with this
contextual knowledge and understanding that there are idiosyncrasies
within language transfer, tutors are more capable of being successful
in their sessions. Rafoth then discusses the concept of
native-speaker privilege, and he makes an interesting observation. In
a case of an international graduate writer whose writing is
well-formed but is littered with non-idiomatic phrasings, only the
tutor can sense the awkwardness in such phrasing. As a result, some
nonnative English speakers specifically avoid tutors that aren't
stereotypically native English speakers—in other words, white. But
through my own experience working in a very multicultural and
multiethnic writing center, such initial biases are often alleviated
through the building of rapport and trust between student and tutor.

In Chapter Three,
Rafoth reminds us all of the difficulty of producing academic
writing, not only for nonnative English speakers but for native
English speakers as well. Pointing out that “most international
students do not enter college with the vocabulary they need for
studying at the college level,” he notes that the same can be said
for many native English speakers (76). When Rafoth shares an example
of multilingual writers receiving “searing comments from
instructors” that banish them to the writing center to “learn to
use Standard English,” one can only recall the multitudes of
instructors across universities that also fail to teach writing to
native English speakers as well (81). With this in mind, tutors must
be flexible with their help. As Rafoth continues, “[t]utors who
come to their jobs with narrow views about writing based on the
belletristic conventions of literary works or who overgeneralize the
conventions for writing in any discipline will almost certainly
mislead the writers they tutor” (91). Rafoth advises tutors to
learn metatextual markers for academic writing, such as thesis,
summary, counterargument and parallel structure, but also warns
against the overuse of lexicon devolving into a dense intimidating
discourse (89).

Editing has always been
a topic of contention for writing centers. As tutors, we do not want
to mechanically sift through student writing and highlight fixable
errors, and yet we also don't want to vindicate a negative reputation
of writing centers “dismissing students' concerns about editing and
proofreading” (108). In Chapter Four,
Corrective Feedback,
Rafoth builds on Mina Shaughnessy's notions of error to offer insight
into how to approach revision in an informed and productive manner.
First off, it’s important to note that errors are reflective of
“writers’ literacy background, age, and experience, but not any
moral failings” (106). One strategy that Rafoth focuses his
attention on is recasting, often enacted through a student reading a
passage and a tutor rereading the passage with corrections: e.g., “a
student writes, ‘Last week I write him an e-mail,’ and the tutor
repeats, ‘Last week you wrote him an e-mail’” (114).
However, without “discussion about how the tutor was spotting
errors or what proofreading strategy was being followed,” recasting
can become mere editing (116). Proper corrective feedback not only
points out specific errors in writing, but also provides thorough
reasoning on why and how to approach such errors.

Rafoth's final chapter, Preparing Ourselves and
Our Tutors, is a reminder for writing
center directors on the many facets of running a writing center. He
borrows University of Manitoba's writing services coordinator Kathy
Block’s tutor prep program as a good example of acclimating new
tutors to their work: starting with fourteen hours of tutor
development (e.g., learning a basic knowledge of the structure of
language along with the day-to-day duties of a tutor), and followed
by shadowing experienced tutors and being tutored themselves (127).
Again, Rafoth emphasizes flexibility as a tutor, which entails being
prepared to “encounter writers who speak a wider variety of
languages, including varieties of English” (138). Finally, he ends
with a poignant note that directors and tutors alike have much to
learn from multilingual writers and the literacies that they can
bring to the writing center.

One criticism of
Rafoth’s book is the lack of specific praxis-related techniques
that can help tutors work with multilingual writers. As such, perhaps
the book is best utilized early in the tutor development process,
preparing nascent tutors and reminding experienced tutors “with
growing numbers of minority and multilingual college students . . .
who speak a wider variety of languages, including varieties of
English” (138). Afterwards, more praxis-focused work can help
tutors negotiate among writing cultures to “identify the cultural
variant[s] and then offer some consulting techniques that might be
used to create a common ground based on [those] variant[s]”
(Mosher, Granroth, and Hicks 3). For example, writing consultants
Mosher, Granroth, and Hicks recommend tutors use an acronym they
refer to as the WATCH approach during a writing consultation:

W – Talk about the WRITER.
A – Talk about the AUDIENCE/ASSIGNMENT.
T – Talk about the writer's TEXT.
C – A few COMMUNICATION CAVEATS.
H – Remember, HELPING the writer is your primary purpose. (3)

A praxis-oriented tool,
WATCH reminds tutors that each writer brings a unique cultural
context to a writing consultation, especially multilingual writers.
Although strong multilingual competence is a desired trait for all
tutors to have, what's realistically achievable is harnessing
cultural awareness through the building of tutor/student rapport.

Another problem with
Rafoth's discourse is that it sometimes implies that all native
English speakers are homogeneous. When preparing to work with
multilingual students, “tutors must be prepared well,” he argues,
“beyond what comes naturally to an earnest, well-read, and verbal
native speaker” (137). But just as multilingual writers vary
broadly, so too do native English speakers. It is important to take
note of these numerous voices when we provide students with
corrective feedback, so as not to marginalize them or their writing.

Overall, Multilingual
Writers and Writing Centers gives a good context for our
contemporary writing centers as multilingual spaces. Rafoth's
discourse also serves as a reminder of one-to-one tutoring
problematics, which are not specific to multilingual students but
rather practical for tutoring in general. Paired with a book
specifically on the praxis of ESL writing, such as Eli Hinkel's
Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary
and Grammar, Rafoth's volume is a great complementary read into
multilingual issues for directors, tutors, and scholars of writing
centers. Nevertheless, Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers
is an important reminder for directors and tutors alike that the
populations of writing centers, and universities as well, are always
changing. As such, our pedagogies too, whether they align with
Stephen North's or Muriel Harris's, should remain dialectical and in
flux. Understanding situations of multilingual writers not only
benefits the writers that come to our writing centers, but it also
strengthens the pedagogies of directors and tutors.